Writing for Social Sciences and Humanities: Bridge Programs and Improving Graduate Student Outcomes

Abstract

Graduate student writing is an under-attended to challenge for many incoming graduate students, whose skill levels often do not match the expectations of their graduate programs. Utilizing socialization theory as a foundation, we propose a Writing Bridge Program model to quickly, affordably, and clearly, develop graduate student writing, improve retention, and demystify the hidden curriculum. This article lays out the need for explicit graduate writing instruction and offers a model for meeting this need, particularly in low-resource environments. In order to evaluate the success of the program, we look at qualitative student comments regarding their experience in the Writing Bridge Program. We offer evidence for how dedicated writing programs can impact student attitudes toward the writing process through improved confidence and familiarity, and by decreasing feelings of impostor syndrome and isolation.

Keywords:

• Graduate writing
• hidden curriculum
• student outcomes
• academic socialization
• writing program
• writing development

Introduction

There is a compelling and long-standing argument that writing instruction should be an explicit component of graduate level education (see Caffarella and Barnett 2000; Salle, Hallett, and Tierney 2011; Rose and McClafferty 2001), and yet, rarely do graduate programs make a concerted effort to provide writing help to students who are not considered “remedial” (Salle, Hallett, and Tierney 2011). While “higher education operates based on the assumption that students entering graduate school should be more proficient writers than they were upon entering college for the first time,” this is often not the case at all; in fact, research suggests that incoming graduate students may write no better than high school seniors entering college for the first time (Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, and Newsom 2009). In sum, there exists a ​​serious mismatch between the expectations of higher education and the realities of graduate student ability. Addressing this mismatch is particularly essential in fields like political science, which rely on writing assignments not only to improve students’ critical thinking skills and enable them to synthesize new knowledge (Franklin, Weinberg, and Reifler 2014), but also to train them to communicate effectively both with others in the field as well as with the broader public (Lupia and Aldrich 2015).

Theoretical work on socialization theory has called specifically for a “coherent intervention to produce proficient graduate writers” (Jones 2018, 174). A select number of programs do exist to help prepare incoming students for the rigors of graduate school. Graduate-school preparation interventions like the McNair program, involving faculty-student mentoring and faculty-led research programs for first-generation, aspiring graduate students have had demonstrable success at improving retention and graduation rates, suggesting that summer interventions for incoming graduate students can be highly effective (Raymond and Black 2008; Ishiyama and Hopkins 2003). However, these programs are resource-intensive, available to a very limited and select set of incoming graduate students, and are not writing-specific.

One possibility for addressing the graduate student skills-gap in writing is to offer explicit writing instruction to graduate students, either before those students enter graduate school or as a part of their foundational graduate curriculum. However, calls for explicit writing education have raised a fundamental problem that confounds most graduate programs and stifles writing education – who would teach a course on scholarly writing? Faculty are already overburdened with teaching, research, and service demands, and at institutions outside of the elite few, faculty are also often underpaid; together, these factors dampen faculty enthusiasm and willingness to offer writing instruction (Rose and McClafferty 2001). Given that such intensive programs are not widely available and are likely to face difficulties in administration, we are interested in the important possibility of improving graduate student success through smaller initiatives.

We propose a new model for offering writing instruction and creating a space for academic socialization without adding to curriculum demands on students or significantly increasing teaching demands on faculty. In the paper that follows, we detail and discuss the impact of a week-long summer intensive course we call the Writing Bridge Program. We argue that a one-week intensive writing program can equip incoming graduate students with the basic tools for success in graduate school, provide skill-building opportunities, and offer strategies that improve student feelings of efficacy and emotional support as they move into their various graduate programs.

High impact interventions

Graduate students are typically expected to know how to write before entering graduate school, yet few have received explicit writing instruction during their undergraduate career to prepare them for the rigors of graduate writing (Salle, Hallett, and Tierney 2011). Many “bridge” program interventions, which seek to help students bridge the gap between one stage of their education and the next, have focused on preparing students from underrepresented groups to pursue fields of study associated with demonstrably high barriers to entry, such as physics, mathematics, and other STEM disciplines (Diefes-Dux 2002; Song and Ma 2018; Stassun et al. 2011).¹ But assessments of low-income, first-generation, and minority students’ needs suggest that these disciplines are not the only part of higher education where a bridge is needed (Raymond and Black 2008). Graduate populations are becoming increasingly diverse across all fields of study (Badenhorst et al. 2015), and even students who come from traditionally advantaged backgrounds often experience a mismatch between the expectations of graduate school and their own abilities (Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, and Newsom 2009). In political science, numerous studies have documented the issues minority students face that result in a leaky pipeline–things like difficulties in forming coauthor relationships, lack of appropriate mentorship, and inadequate social support (Monforti and Michelson 2008; Tormos-Aponte and Velez-Serrano 2020)

In all cases, evidence suggests that early interventions, particularly in graduate writing, are more effective than waiting until students are in crisis (Bair and Mader 2013; Jones 2018). A highly effective bridging program, whether broad or writing specific, should go beyond specific skills to incorporate content about the broader educational experience students might expect (e.g. practice interacting with faculty or more specialized) and normally untaught knowledge about the workings of graduate school (Raymond and Black 2008). Socializing graduate writers through explicit instruction on developing peer relationships, seeking out mentorship, and receiving new information can have a positive impact on graduate students’ experience and reduce feelings of isolation (Caffarella and Barnett 2000; Jones 2018; Tremblay-Wragg et al. 2021).

Research on student attitudes and approaches toward writing found that graduate students often have faulty beliefs about the writing process. Many graduate students do not revise their work; they express a belief that writing should somehow be intuitive, and may harbor significant doubt about their writing abilities (Lavelle and Bushrow 2007). Successful bridging and socialization programs can counteract impostor syndrome – the internal experience of believing oneself to be unintelligent in spite of evidence of success (Clance and Imes 1978) – by providing graduate writers with the tools to skill-build after leaving the program. This includes explicit writing instruction that introduces students to meaningful academic conventions such as the literature review (Rankin 1998) and the ability to deconstruct and analyze academic writing. Successful programs will also focus on writing as a collaborative process (Bair and Mader 2013; Badenhorst et al. 2015), and in doing so, equip students to seek out support from other students and partnerships with faculty.

This kind of explicit socialization into graduate writing can act as an emotional inoculation against self-doubt. Graduate students are typically expected to already possess the ability to give and receive critique, yet research has clearly established that most students do not possess these skills at the time of enrollment (Lavelle and Bushrow 2007; Salle, Hallett, and Tierney 2011). Evidence suggests that most incoming graduate students have not meaningfully improved their writing skills during their undergraduate experience (Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, and Newsom 2009). In contrast, students who have been explicitly taught skills, like understanding and incorporating critique, produce stronger writing and are able to build confidence as academics, in spite of the often frustrating and emotional nature of the process (Caffarella and Barnett 2000).

Given all this, explicit graduate writing instruction² clearly has benefits in terms of academic socialization, confidence, and skill-building; yet writing programs are rarely offered to incoming graduate students. Writing programs are often expensive to administer and may be burdensome to faculty, meaning that there is little will to teach such courses (Rose and McClafferty 2001). We suggest an approach that targets graduate writing and socialization in a brief, but intensive manner with the goal of providing the aforementioned benefits in a manner that is accessible even to graduate programs who have relatively few resources and highly burdened faculty.

Writing bridge program: the model

With funding from the Jane Nelson Institute for Women's Leadership at Texas Woman's University (TWU), we developed a week-long summer writing program and offered it for the first time at the end of the summer of 2021. The program and research described here was conducted with the approval of TWU’s IRB under the approval #IRB-FY2021-362. TWU is a majority-minority institution and serves a predominantly low-income student body. All incoming Master’s students in history, political science, English, sociology, and multicultural women and gender studies at TWU were invited to participate in the program. We scheduled the program in August, one week before orientation events were scheduled to take place, with the intent of maximizing the likelihood that students would be able to attend. Because bridge programs are commonly held outside of the planned academic year, it is difficult to make attendance a requirement for eligible students. With this in mind, we designed the program to look and feel as much like an exclusive professionalization workshop (and as little like a remedial class) as possible. For instance, each student was provided with their own free copy of the book They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein–material from this text was incorporated throughout the week, but students were also encouraged to continue using it as a resource and guide as they began their classes. Additionally, we provided lunch for all participants for the duration of the program, ordering something different each day. In this way, the Bridge Program’s very design is organized to demonstrate to participants that they are no longer being treated as undergraduates. Rather, the program is presented as a valuable amenity for aspiring academics and professionals.³

The first iteration of the program was taught by three professors, two social scientists and one English professor.⁴ This was particularly effective for addressing discipline-specific norms and standards, allowed us to highlight important epistemological differences between writing in the social sciences and the humanities, and ensured that all of our participants were receiving appropriate instruction. The curriculum of the program teaches thesis writing skills, genre transferring, productive writing and work habits and aims to demystify the “hidden curriculum” of graduate school. By hidden curriculum, we mean the unwritten, unspoken expectations that serve to differentiate and stratify students, thereby reinforcing hierarchies and disparities (Margolis 2001). This includes (but is not limited to) expected norms of behavior, such as being able to identify and replicate certain norms of academic writing, knowing how and when to seek-out and incorporate feedback, and being able to read and comprehend large volumes of academic writing at a rapid pace. A day-by-day breakdown of the curricular coverage is included in Table 1.

Table 1. Writing bridge program basic curriculum.

Writing Bridge Program basic curriculum
	Themes	Specific activities
Day 1	Ideas and invention Turning confusion into questions Gathering information	Discuss how scholars come up with questions Basic differences between undergraduate and graduate questions Scoping questions appropriately Reading as “listening” to academic conversations Deconstruct an abstract - can we tell what conversation the author is entering and what kind of questions they are asking?
Day 2	Entering the academic conversation Citation	Purpose of a literature review as a way to gather information and build ideas Introduce “they say, I say” moves. Read a literature review and discuss Potential literature review organization strategies Importance and purpose of citation Annotated bibliography as a tool for snapshotting current state of literature Introduce citation managers & online resources
Day 3	Goal setting Outlining and drafting	Establishing SMART Goals Exercise: set goals and timeline for a 15-page paper Bare bones structure of empirical, historiographic, and interpretive writing Learning to reverse outline an article
Day 4	Revising and editing Writing as collaborative process	Read, discuss Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” Writing as an iterative process Deep revision, reorganizing, and rewriting Getting feedback and possible sources Giving and incorporative constructive feedback Coping with feedback and emotions
Day 5	Peer mentorship Editing and polishing Genre shifting Transferable skills	Peer feedback and peer mentoring Polishing academic prose Tools: academic phrasebook, pre submission checklist Proofreading and final editing Moving beyond the research paper: look at other styles of writing outside academia Deconstruct writing in policy briefs, press releases, and op-ed pieces Final discussion and reflections

None of the writing the students do during the week of the program is graded. Instead, students learn to think of the writing process as an iterative one, reviewing their own work, getting comments from peers, and building positive habits that they can carry with them into graduate school. Students are encouraged to think about writing as a skill they will continue to build throughout their lives. No one is so good at writing that they can stop practicing, and no one is so unpracticed that they cannot improve. To encourage this message and embolden students to try out new strategies for improving their writing process, we made sure to share examples of our own work and experiences along the way⁵. Learning is in the job description of an academic and a bridge program is an important socialization into understanding learning as voluntary activity, rather than as something imposed by professors.

The program curriculum is structured to follow the basic steps of the writing process - from invention to execution. Over the course of five days, students learn how to ask good questions, come to understand writing as joining a conversation, and conclude by seeing the work they have done as a transferable skill. The Bridge Program began each day at 9am with a free-write that both professors and students engaged in, establishing the habit of writing as a process and a practice. The schedule and basic content of the Writing Bridge Program is outlined in Table 1. Though the curriculum is organized around the writing process, it was developed with broader socialization goals in mind. Throughout the program, professors emphasized the values of being open to feedback, collaboration, and student-agency.

It is worth noting that we do not claim to have conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis of existing bridge programs; nor do we claim to be offering an entirely unique or unheard of opportunity to our students. This Bridge Program curriculum is both similar to existing programs, and an extension. Existing bridge programs in mathematics and STEM have commonly focused on impacting content knowledge and bridging gaps in necessary methodological skills before students enter undergraduate or graduate education (Song and Ma 2018; Stassun et al. 2011; Diefes-Dux 2002). These programs often emphasize specific content mastery, rather than a broad skills-based approach. Other programs, such as those targeted specifically to undergraduate success, have focused on socialization and skills, though not necessarily all academic, such as teaching students to register for classes or use academic and social support services available on campus (Cabrera, Miner, and Milem 2013). Our Bridge Program does emphasize the importance of social networks in graduate learning (such as the value of peer mentorship and peer review), as well as help students identify institutional opportunities for support (such as the campus writing center). However, the curriculum and goals we outline here go beyond content mastery or making students aware of institutional opportunities. Our goals are aimed at giving students a broad set of tools that they can use, going forward, to build their own success in graduate school.

Defining success

The creation and design of the program reflect seven specific goals. Five revolve around important knowledge and skills and were communicated directly and repeatedly to the participants throughout the program. Additionally, we articulated two goals for improving our participants’ experience of writing and graduate school that were not communicated directly to the students but were more implicitly infused throughout the week.

The five knowledge and skill-based goals of the program, as communicated to the participants, are described below.

Differentiate undergraduate vs. graduate experience/expectations

Even in top programs populated with students from elite universities, most incoming graduate students have only a vague idea of what academic research entails. Undergraduate research papers are typically oriented around summarizing existing research, rather than creating new knowledge by asking theoretical or investigative questions. Graduate students need to make a mental shift from consuming information to producing information. This kind of work further requires a change in process from ad-hoc work to systematic project development.

Join the conversation and asking “good” questions

Producing knowledge first entails recognizing the academic conversation, listening closely, and beginning to identify your niche. This also involves viewing the scientific process as one in which many researchers are working in tandem to answer big questions, often through tackling smaller parts of the larger whole. We believe that there is an (often unspoken) art to asking “good” research questions, students must learn to ask questions that are bite sized and achievable but also worthwhile. They must avoid tilting at windmills (asking questions that are nearly impossible to answer) without resorting to looking under the lamppost (only asking and answering the most obvious and simple questions, without further examination); finding this balance is easier said than done.

Learn the genre

In service of this goal, we spent considerable time explicitly discussing the skills required to begin reading and doing research, including understanding academic literature as an ongoing conversation, as well as posessing the skills to place oneself inside that conversation through the convention of a literature review. This also requires learning the “language” of academic writing. While jargon is generally undesirable, it is an indisputable fact that research publications conform to certain conventions, and those conventions differ depending on whether the research is of an empirical, historiographical, or interpretive nature. Students should be taught to expressly recognize and identify different writing structures and conventions, a skill that is not only useful in adapting to academia, but also transferable to nonacademic writing.

Engage in revising, editing and drafting

For most undergraduates, the process of producing a paper usually involves a maximum of two steps. Students write their paper and, if their professors are very lucky, they proofread it before turning it in. Producing graduate quality work requires a major shift in the process of writing – students that continue to write and submit papers the same way they did in college often receive unsatisfactory grades over and over again, not understanding how to adapt. We believe students should be explicitly introduced to techniques like reverse planning, setting achievable goals, outlining, and producing progressive drafts. These strategies become particularly important as students begin to take on bigger and longer-term projects.

Give and take feedback

One of the central messages of the program is that writing and research are fundamentally collaborative enterprises. Most undergraduates refrain from sharing their work with anyone but their professors. A major goal of the program is to help participants begin to seek out and exchange feedback with peers as well as mentors. Because students tend to feel vulnerable sharing their work, it is important to help them actively practice giving and receiving constructive comments, and to empower them to recognize it when the feedback they’ve been given is less than constructive. In this way, students are invited to enter not just graduate school, but to step into the broader academic community.

The above goals were regularly presented and explained to the program participants during the week. The purpose of sharing this information was to illustrate as clearly as possible why we were asking them to engage in activities or discussions. Because the above goals are centered around skills that can be improved through active and purposive practice, we wanted them to become part of the very expectations our students hold about graduate school.

However, central to our interest in creating the program are two goals that are not skill-based, but which may be indirectly achieved (at least in part) through our curriculum. Beyond helping participants establish expectations, develop skills, and identify resources, the program is intended to promote the following two intrapersonal goals:

Increase confidence

While the majority of graduate students struggle with issues of low confidence at one time or another, this problem is particularly acute among underrepresented groups, particularly first-generation, low-income, and minority students (Ishiyama and Hopkins 2003). Students with lower levels of perceived self-efficacy are less likely to pursue a graduate degree or persist in its completion. We believe that part of this stems from a lack of familiarity with academia and a lack of exposure to insider information. Rather than assuming that students who don’t know the rules of the game will figure them out along the way, we argue that students can be better served by formalized and explicit discussions of the basics of graduate school, ranging from an introduction to terminology and available resources to a more in-depth examination of the institutional and social structures of academia. Students who feel prepared feel confident. Our program deliberately and clearly demystifies many of the unwritten expectations of graduate school, including skills such as how to effectively read abstracts, literature reviews, and articles, how and when to seek out peer mentorship, and what kind of resources students can use to ease their way into academia - from citation managers, to academic phrase banks, to book recommendations.

Decrease sense of isolation

A related issue, which again impacts most graduate students but is disproportionately observed among members of underrepresented groups, is a sense of social and academic isolation (Ishiyama and Hopkins 2003). Students that see themselves as underprepared or different from their peers tend to feel as though they do not belong in graduate school or that their acceptance was a mistake. By sharing our own experiences and vulnerabilities and demonstrating the centrality of collaborating–of giving and soliciting help–to the research process, we can attempt to mitigate students’ sense of isolation and start to inculcate a habit of community-building into their writing process.

Evaluating the program

At the end of our session on the final day of the program, participants were asked to write a short reflection about what they would take away from the experience. Students were given two questions, (1) Which parts of what we’ve learned this week do you plan to implement right away? and (2) What will be most useful to you in the long term? All attendees completed this exercise. We asked students to submit their responses, but explained that we might extract quotes from what they’d written to illustrate our assessment of the program. Students were given the option to decline sharing if they preferred their work not be quoted⁶.

In their responses, participants made reference to a number of different skills and strategies that were discussed and exercised throughout the week, but participants’ responses demonstrate that students saw particular value in material from Day 3 (goal setting, outlining, drafting) and Day 4 (revising, editing, writing as a collaborative process) of the program. Below, a selection of quotes from participants’ responses in Tables 2 and 3 illustrate how students repeatedly assessed elements from these lessons as the most valuable takeaways.

Table 2. Quotes referring to Day 3: goal setting, outlining, drafting.

Participant	Quotes referring to Day 3: goal setting, outlining, drafting
C	“In the future, I hope to make the specific parts of my writing process more distinct. I tend to blend them together a lot.”
A	“Not only did I learn terminology, tools, and tricks but I also learned to take a deep breath and embrace the process. The ability to break down a project into achievable steps.”
B	“I rarely set goals for myself and I think the SMART goals will be very helpful to my self-esteem and writing skills.”
E	“Another huge lesson for me was about SMART goals and scope. I looked back on so many failed writing projects I never finished because I was taking on too much.”
C	“I think a lot of my procrastination comes from wanting it to be perfect, and if it’s not perfect, then what’s the point? But just getting the shitty draft over with will hopefully help with procrastination a lot!”

Table 3. Quotes referring to Day 4: revising, editing, writing as a collaborative process.

Participant	Quotes referring to Day 4: revising, editing, writing as a collaborative process
B	“I had an issue with time management before this class and would spend too much time on composing and not enough on revising.”
C	“I also tend to draft, revise, and edit all in one go, so taking the time to separate those and focus on the process will help my writing immensely.”
D	“I also plan on implementing better revision techniques and utilizing the comradery of my peers to end up with better end results.”
D	“Before this workshop, the thing I dreaded the most was receiving feedback. I felt that feedback was an attack on my writing and thus an attack on me. I now feel that this mindset hindered me from growing as an academic, and I am more willing to send out my writing and have it critiqued.”

In terms of the skill-based goals we set for the program, the quotes in Tables 2 and 3 suggest that our curriculum has the most pronounced impact on the capabilities discussed in our first, fourth, and fifth goals. Our first goal, to help students differentiate between the expectations of undergraduate and graduate work, is indicated by Participants A and C in Table 2, where both refer to thinking about writing as a multi-step “process.” Many of the quotes in Tables 2 and 3 refer to setting achievable goals, drafting, and revising work, which suggests our program is very effective at promoting our fourth goal, and Participant D in Table 3 discusses the importance of seeking out feedback, which lines up well with our fifth goal.

However, even more exciting was the information in the responses that was not directly solicited. While the questions focused purely on the practical–which skills students would implement and which were most useful–the answers went well beyond these concerns, addressing clearly the more indirect, intrapersonal experiences of our participants. The following quotes from participants’ responses in Table 4 provide strong evidence in favor of the value of a skill-based bridge program for providing more than skills alone.

Table 4 Quotes relating to intrapersonal experience.^a

Participant	Quotes relating to intrapersonal experience
B	“Coming into this workshop I felt as if my writing skills were just good enough to get by, but I feel much more confident in those skills now. I have a voice that needs to be heard and my writing is the tool to do that.”
E	“I learned so much from the Bridge writing program. The most fundamental lesson was that the anxieties I experience are universal and everybody experiences them at all levels of writing.”
D	“I am definitely less afraid to reach out for help than I was.”
A	“I think overall the main point I have taken away is that this is doable, I can work through the process- but mainly that I am not alone. I have tools to start and mentors to turn to along the way.”

^aEmphasis added by article authors.

In the quotes in Table 4, key phrases have been highlighted to illustrate how the work participants did in the Writing Bridge Program impacted them on an intrapersonal level. Without being prompted, students expressed an increased feeling of confidence and self-efficacy. They also communicated a reduced sense of isolation, pointing both to a recognition of common experience with their peers, as well as an increased comfort with turning to others for help. Particularly given that participants were not directly asked about these feelings, these responses provide early but compelling qualitative evidence in favor of the psychological impact of bridging programs⁷.

Discussion

Based on a qualitative assessment of the responses our participants produced at the end of the program, the curriculum we have designed effectively addresses several of our skill-based and both of our intrapersonal, experiential goals. Students pointed, in particular, to techniques we covered that can improve their capacity to draft, edit and revise their work, and to an increased comfort seeking out and utilizing feedback. Responses also demonstrated an improvement in students’ understanding of the writing and academic expectations of graduate school. Even more importantly, students expressed an increased sense of confidence and self-efficacy and a reduced perception of self-isolation. These early findings offer a substantial endorsement of the outsized potential impacts of a short, targeted bridge program for incoming graduate students.⁸

A major limitation of our current findings is that our sample size is quite small. The funding for this first iteration of our Bridge Program was approved in the summer of 2021, meaning students could not be invited to attend until mere weeks before the beginning of the program. Many of our students work full time, resulting in low enrollment for the first year⁹. We are confident that this number will increase going into the second year of the program as we are able to provide programmatic information upon accepting students into graduate school. That said, the average size of the master’s programs included is quite small, meaning we cannot test the importance of exposure to our curriculum on as large a group as we’d like. We hope that in future, other researchers may implement our curriculum in emerging bridge programs at their own institutions to determine if our findings are replicable.

An important next step for our research involves a quantitative analysis of the impact of our program on participants. To accomplish this, we designed a longitudinal survey for incoming graduate students. All invited students, regardless of intent to participate in the Bridge Program, were surveyed one week before the program and one week after it concluded. Students received a third follow up survey at the end of their first semester and were asked to complete a fourth at the end of their first year. The survey asks them about their feelings about graduate school and writing, about their approach to the writing process, and about their exposure to specific academic genres and forms, among other things. In the summer of 2021, our presurvey had a high response rate while our follow-up surveys experienced sharp drop-offs in responsiveness. We are extremely interested in finding creative ways to increase our response rates for the follow-up surveys as our program grows (our institutional review board will not allow us to call them compulsory). Additionally, in future iterations of the program we plan to include a reflection at the beginning of the week in addition to the reflections students wrote at the end of the week. This will provide us with additional qualitative data and will enable more detailed analysis.

The experience that our students report, however, aligns with the assessments from (the relatively few) other graduate bridge programs, though most are in STEM rather than the social sciences. Graduate bridge programs help students adjust to the differences between undergraduate and graduate education, focus on mentoring, and give students the close attention necessary to ensure that they have a successful start to their graduate career; students in these programs reported an expanded network of peers and feeling more prepared and better socialized after completing the programs (Amelink et al. 2016; Hodapp and Woodle 2017; Stassun et al. 2011). Even in STEM programs, the experience of being connected to other graduate students and socialized into a network of peers was found to be of particular value for students. Much like the participants in our program, the participants in a STEM bridge program at Virginia Tech benefited from clarified expectations about the experience facing them, they “expected graduate school to be challenging but having the summer bridge program allowed them to develop a network of support they could rely on moving forward” (Amelink et al. 2016, 8). Our Writing Bridge Program resulted in similarly positive feelings of preparation and support among the limited sample of students who we were able to reach, indicating the need for continued expansion and outreach.

Accepting students from underrepresented groups into graduate programs is not enough to close the gap in educational outcomes between these students and more privileged groups. Graduate programs impose a wide host of barriers in the shape of informal, implicit, social, and academic expectations. Constantly colliding with these barriers puts students without advanced knowledge of the hidden curriculum at a major disadvantage (Badenhorst et al. 2015). If graduate schools are to dam the “leaky pipeline” of academia, they must take explicit steps to reduce such burdens on first-generation and underrepresented students. Our results from the first iteration of our Bridge Program highlight two major implications for programs with many students from underrepresented populations or for programs that seek to promote more diverse incoming classes. First, while academic skills take years and lots of practice to acquire, students can make enormous strides in a very short period of time through the simple process of making implicit expectations explicit. If students are aware of the gaps in their own training and know of resources they can turn to for self-improvement, they are much more likely to meet and surpass the standards of graduate coursework. Second, the straightforward process of communicating expectations and support to students can have an even more important positive impact on their intrapersonal feelings of confidence and belonging. In short, students need help making the transition to graduate school – they need a bridge.

Conclusion

Particularly for institutions that serve large populations of low-income, minority, and first-generation students, the importance of programs that have the potential to improve retention and student outcomes cannot be overstated. Incoming graduate students at such institutions have neither the time nor the money to take additional courses or paid workshops before or during their graduate education to develop skills they were not exposed to as undergraduates but that are expected of them upon graduate enrollment. Similarly, instructors at most graduate institutions recognize that many of their incoming students are not fully prepared but are unable to dedicate valuable class time to uncovering and filling in the gaps. Indeed, many professors may not themselves have the pedagogical training or capacity to do such work in their own classrooms, depending on the subjects they teach or their own bandwidth and workload. Existing bridge programs are rare, in part because they tend to be longer, more resource-intensive experiences. But a smaller, more limited program that focuses on specific skills can still serve as a highly effective bridge into graduate school. We offer such a solution – a writing program that can be taught in a week-long intensive format to build skills and provide resources that allow graduate students to continue improving their writing after the program ends. Early results from the program indicate an improvement in students’ goal-setting, drafting and revising skills, and willingness to seek out feedback. Results also demonstrate an improvement in participant confidence and feelings of belonging. These findings suggest that our curriculum could serve as a model for bridge programs at other institutions and have lasting benefits to student recipients.

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Jane Nelson Institute for Women’s Leadership at Texas Woman’s University under Award [#3580].

Notes on contributors

Vivienne Born

Vivienne Born is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department Social Sciences and Historical Studies at Texas Woman’s University, where she teaches courses in International Relations and Comparative Politics.

Clare Brock

Clare Brock is an assistant professor of Political Science at Texas Woman’s University in the Department of Social Sciences and Historical Studies at Texas Woman’s University, where she teaches American politics and public policy.

Notes

1 Graduate bridge programs and undergraduate bridge programs are, by our observation, typically fairly distinct in their goals and focus. As noted, graduate bridge programs are often focused on content-mastery, whereas, we find that undergraduate bridge programs are often focused on socialization into the university in ways that are not specifically academic, including helping students identify resources available to them, navigate tasks such as class registration, and learn to live in the college setting (Cabrera, Miner, and Milem 2013; Garcia and Paz 2009). While we believe that undergraduate bridge programs can serve an important role and bear additional study and exploration, we cannot make specific claims as to their efficacy in this article, nor do we suggest an approach that would aim to combine these two types of programs. We believe that the expectations of graduate research and writing are considerably different than those required for undergraduate education, indeed, this belief is the impetus for establishing our program.

2 We designed this program specifically with graduate students in mind because of the lack of targeted writing instruction available to new graduate students. While we believe interventions like the Writing Bridge program described here would also be productive for undergraduate students, undergraduates are almost universally required to complete one or two classes dedicated to strengthening their writing skills. At Texas Woman's University, for example, the core curriculum includes Composition I and Composition II. By contrast, graduate students have no analogous introduction to academic writing.

3 We believe this framing is particularly important for Texas Woman's University graduate students, who are often mid-career or returning to graduate school after long breaks, and who would not appreciate a program that felt infantilizing.

4 Based on our budget proposal, the Jane Nelson Institute for Women's Leadership (JNIWL) awarded us $24,750 to be used over the course of three years. This included a yearly $2,500 task payment for each of the three professors running the program as well as $750 per year for textbooks for the students. Due to their funding rules, the JNIWL was unable to provide the money for the daily lunches. However, we were able to secure internal financial support from the Dean’s office to cover this final part of the budget.

5 For instance, as part of our broader discussion on how to process feedback effectively, we shared a set of reviewer comments that one of us had received on an early-career paper submission. The comments, beyond being critical, were unnecessarily harsh—exactly the kind of feedback students (and professors) fear—but we used them to demonstrate that even comments that aren’t constructive can be mined for productive information. Students practiced extracting the venom from the harsh words by laughing at them and then reframing them as constructive, actional pieces of advice.

6 Because some students chose not to submit their reflections, we are unable to provide a complete picture of the contents of the responses. However, we have, to the best of our ability, represented all of the responses that were shared with us, see footnote 8 for additional details.

7 While we were only able to draw quotes from the reflections of students who gave permission (five students allowed us to quote their responses), the ideas and feelings communicated in the quotes in the above tables are consistent with the views expressed in the broader group discussion following the exercise. During this discussion, students had the opportunity to share some of their thoughts out loud without submitting their written response. As with most of our group discussions throughout the week, all participants chose to contribute to the dialogue.

8 It is worth noting that the content and approach of the Writing Bridge program described in this paper can become worthwhile additions to graduate classes taking place during the course of the normal academic year as well. We encourage the adaptation and inclusion of any relevant components of our curriculum into graduate courses where possible but maintain that this does not preclude the usefulness of a dedicated, intensive, pre-semester bridge program. A major element of what makes the Writing Bridge so important is that it is designed to mitigate the distress that comes from feeling unprepared and alone.

9 Our enrollment for the 2021 program was just 14 students.